Author: Kate Davies Designs
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Yorlin KAL
It’s time to announce the KDD summer KAL! Will you join us and knit yourself a Yorlin? Knitted in 4ply (or equivalent) at a gauge of 28 stitches to 4 inches, Yorlin is a lightweight, airy cardigan. Knitted from the top down, Yorlin features raglan shaping through the upper body, twisted-stitch trims, and two beautiful…
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Breaking away
I am currently reading Anne Goldgar’s excellent Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (2007), a book which is perhaps less about tulips themselves than about what they represented in the seventeenth-century Dutch republic. Much like the balloon-o-mania of the 1780s, for this era’s moral commentators, tulips were emblematic of what they…
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Mary Moser’s tulips
As I was looking for images of “broken” tulips in historic collections the other day, I happened across a series of watercolour studies in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which were the work of Mary Moser. Moser was an interesting eighteenth-century artist, who, because she specialised in botanical subjects, has often been dismissed in the…
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a broken tulip
“Come quickly,” I said to Tom, “and bring the camera. We’ve got a broken tulip.” “a broken tulip?” “Yes! A broken one! Just check it out!” “Hmm. It certainly looks like a freaky tulip” “It is freaky! In fact, a tulip that has broken in this particular colour combination is actually known as a bizarre.”…
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Knitting Bullshit
My theme today is Knitting Bullshit and before I begin, I had better explain to you what I understand bullshit to be. In what follows, “bullshit” is used very much in the sense that Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt describes in his seminal essay, On Bullshit (1986; 2005). For Frankfurt, bullshit is an utterance with “a…
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Knitting Wester Ross
The book is out, all pre-ordered copies have been shipped (thank you, Kate C and Kendall) and club members can access the full e-book in your Ravelry libraries. Knitting Wester Ross is now available to purchase in the KDD shop and by way of celebration, I thought I’d reproduce the book’s introduction here today. This…
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“Peppermintstick”
Tulip season has arrived – hurrah! I anticipate several happy weeks, in which I savour and enjoy every variety that I carefully chose and planted last November. I have several lasagne-style tulip pots at the front of the house, as well as a sizeable display round the back . . . . . . and…
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Concrete Legacies
We are anticipating the publication of Knitting Wester Ross today, and the team is ready (and waiting) in the KDD warehouse to begin the process of shipping the book out to club members, before putting it on general sale. This interim – between the completion of a book and its publication – is often a…
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Cornish break
Hello! We are home after a short break in south-east Cornwall: a beautiful part of the world which neither Tom nor I had visited before. We enjoyed some lovely spring weather and several long days of great walking, along different sections of the south-west coastal path. I became slightly obsessed with Cornish Hedges – the…
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Skirt of Destiny
It’s time to reveal the final pattern from Knitting Wester Ross: I’m still sad that I was ill at the point in the schedule when this particular design landed, but it’s better late than never. Club members will have already read my essay about Kay Matheson who, with three of her student friends on Christmas…
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Beinn Àirigh Charr
The clocks have gone forward and we have made it through the winter (feeble yay). All over rural Scotland, this seasonal transition is marked by the movement of cattle to summer pastures, a tradition which is inscribed in the landscape with the old names of many fields and hills. Ten minutes walk from my front…
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Brèid
Following on from yesterday’s missive about my Òran Eile / Another Song design, here’s a pattern closely related to it: Brèid: Brèid (pronounced like beige, with a rolled ‘r’ in it) is a Scottish Gaelic word for a kerchief. In Gaelic, brèid is a term applied to many different kinds of cloth or flappy things…
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Another song / Òran eile
Good news this morning: our work is done and the Wester Ross book is away to the printers in Glasgow, which means we should be able to publish it around the middle of next month. I’m sure that in time, with the benefit of distance, I’ll be able to feel proud of this book –…
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helle-bore-us
Warning: this missive contains more helle-boring content! After learning about hellebores and their nectaries I was left wondering at what point, in the history of science, the crucial role these structures played in pollination had been understood. How had early botanists looked at hellebores? How had hellebores been represented in botanical art and illustration? Some…
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Helle-bore
One of the things I love about gardening is the experience it enables of what Buddhists refer to as Beginner’s Mind: I am very much a beginner gardener, and the fact that I inherited my garden means that, over the past two years, I’ve often found myself in a state of confused un-knowing, having to…
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gardening leave
Hello! It’s been a while. As you may have gathered, I have not been well. Some of you will know that I have bipolar disorder and that winter can often be a tricky time. I am aware of this, am used to this, and have a range of strategies in place which (usually) help me…